“What Is It?”

“What is it?”

“Hmmm?” Trollex broke from his reverie. Pulling his attention away from the pups farther down the to look at Reeve. Only to be met with that same worried expression that turned up when he’d spaced out. 

”It’s nothing… don’t worry about it.”

He caught the way her fin lights flickered into lovely shades of red and green.  So often in the palace she kept a tight lock on her colors but here in the wilds she felt no compulsion to hide her anger or how his avoidance made her nervous. 

So, that had been the wrong thing to say…

“It’s the dreams again, isn’t it?” She pressed. An edge to her words.

Trollex just lowered his frills until they were almost even with his neck and turned his head away. Not wanting to see the melting pools of orange displeasure in her biolights cut through with night time purples of care. Making her worry was the last thing he wanted but… 

“Trollex…” Reeve’s voice had gone soft. As much hurt as it was concerned and it tore him up on the inside.

Swiping a hand up into his hair he relented.

“Fine. Yes. It’s the dreams…” Trollex heaved a sigh and roughly thumped his hand back onto the soft sand of the overlook. Sending them into a pointed silence.

Something they sat in for long enough he debated apologizing. He hadn’t meant to snap at her. She was just worried. And he’d been out of it here lately and he usually needed a push to talk about things.. 

His spiraling thoughts quieted as a hand laid on his back. Trollex peaked up to see Reeve had shuffled closer. Her thigh nearly brushing his side and her hip fin draping over his lower back. Lavender and dawn pinks whirled amidst her scales. Complex subtleties of teal and green and yellow stuttering between.

He tried to smile and rested a hand on her knee. Pulsing his own lights with blues and purples that were almost dark enough to blend with his natural colors.

“What was it this time?” She asked softly.

He had told her of his dreams before. The only one he had even mentioned them to. But even with that… trying to articulate what was in his head seemed like too much. Too wild and off the wall as he explained all the voices and snippets that made up some elaborate dreamscape he’s had since he was thirteen.

His eyes slid to the side and back down to the pups in the ravine below. Watching them play under the careful oversight of the local ferals. He couldn’t be sure any of them were the parents but that didn’t seem to matter among them. 

“We were talking… About the kind of life we wanted and being… parents.”

There wasn’t a need to explain ‘who’ he had been talking to. It was always the same mysterious troll. There were sometimes other voices in the mix. A rougher feminine growl here and there, another with a pleasant drawl, one that made his nerves sing for how high it got. And more beyond that. But a single constant was his sweet, soft spoken, singer. 

And the life that Trollex could only imagine through the conversations they shared. 

“Oh… Trollex.” She never laughed at him for what he said. Never told him he was losing his mind or needed to get over whatever hallucinations filled his head when he slept. Never wrote it off as just dreams to shrug off. And sometimes that made it worse. Because he knew the sympathy in her words wasn’t just the pity a parent felt for their child with a nightmare. It was genuine in the same way empathy was given to a friend that had lost a loved one.

“It’s okay… Don’t worry about it…”

---

It's hard to deal with a life you have no way of touching. One you can only piece together through soundbytes. Still, what a pretty picture it paints.

A thought before

-Luxx